AI cheating?

[Craobh Rua]

A clarifcation for something said in the OP. When you went to the wonders page and saw that the UN existed in two cities at the same time, look more closely and you'll see that in at least one of those cities it only says "Under construction". IMO it's weird that "under construction" wonders get listed there but that's just how it is.

And yes, the message that you can no longer continue building a wonder can come up a turn later than you'd want it to. I'm not sure why that happens but if you watch the event messages each turn you will always get the on time message that the wonder was built. In fact if you go and attempt to change the build order in that city you'll no longer be able to switch back to the wonder. It's weird and sort of buggy but it is at least avoidable. Just pay attention to wonder completion messages when you're in a wonder race (I think the messages are always in grey, to help spot them).

EDIT... Actually I reckon I could have a stab at guessing the reason why wonder build order changes come up a turn too late. Hammers always get applied to whatever you're building in your cities at the end of your turn, basically as you pressed the End turn button or press Enter. Let's suppose that at the end of turn 1 you put hammers towards the Pyramids. Also on turn 1 let's suppose an AI finishes that wonder. When turn 2 starts, the city you had building the Pyramids has not been checked for whether it can continue building because that check was performed at the end of turn 1 when it was still possible. Now you hit end turn to end turn 2 and as that city attempts to process the build order for the Pyramids, it can't and so it removes it from the build queue, turns the hammers into gold and you don't learn about it til the start of turn 3.
I hope I explained that well enough. In MP the situation is quite different of course.

Yeah that explains the weird problem I had quite well, so thanks for that.

 

[Craobh Rua]

Probably because some of us began playing with the pretention that AI and human are playing a game with the same set of rules.

Yeah this is what I consider to be fundamental to fair game play and I think its quite natural that if you discover the AI in any game is not playing by the same rules that you are that you become quite annoyed by it. Though on the flip side discovering that you have an unfair advantage over the AI (like in Goldeneye for N64 being able to see and kill bots before they can see/kill you) is usually quite nice.

 

[phungus420]

Yeah this is what I consider to be fundamental to fair game play and I think its quite natural that if you discover the AI in any game is not playing by the same rules that you are that you become quite annoyed by it.

Only chess has an AI that does this, and that has alot to do with the fact litterally millions of man hours have gone into programming an AI to do this. If you think you can design an AI that can simulate a competitive oponent in a complex game like civ, you must be aware that you are basically demanding something with the processing power of a cockroach brain be able to compete with the human brain. It's just not realistic. Computers don't have nearly the processing power people think they do. We form these opinions because they can compute raw numbers quickly, but really the human brain is performing so many more and higher order operations that it is far and away much more powerful. Think about just the process of gaging depth precision, that's a pretty high order computational function, constantly running in the background that you don't even notice. And there are thousands of such operations going on in the human brain simultaneously. A computer just can't keep up, not even close. The best a firm like Firaxis can do is simulate it, and in doing so they need to bend the rules.

As an example the betterAI guys have been trying to code a function to determine relative stack strength so that the AI can better handle when to engage other stacks and or attack a city with it's stack. You just look at your stack, look at the computers and intuitively figure it out (I'm talking stacks of numbers over a dozen units here). Such a function on the computer that gives reasonable results takes minutes to run, and it aproaches hours when just looking at stacks of about 50 units (not unheard of in civ4). Your brain doesn't just judge this, there are very complex mathmatical operations being done to make this determination and intuitively come up with a reasonable guess, yet you can do it in seconds and the computer takes hours.

 

[Craobh Rua]

yeah point well made and I take your argument completely, but I suppose we still at least need the illusion of fair game play in order for it to be enjoyable.
I actually read recently about a new kind of computer memory thats being developed called memristors that will act quite similar to the synapses in our brains, which may make genuinely intelligent AI possible in the near future(hopefully). http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8609885.stm